The past week we’ve continued our quest to get all the skills into the game. This time, the third and final fire spell joins the fray! Its working name is Flamethrower, and it’s a close ranged, channeled spell which does massive damage to anything in front of you.

Click on the image to view an animated gif!

To use this skill effectively, positioning and timing are very important. You’ll want to be able to hit your enemies with the full channel without getting caught by flanking enemies, or hit by a counterattack in case the enemy is too tough to stunlock!

The skill channel is both shield- and movecancelable, meaning you won’t be stuck if things get dangerous. The uncharged version will cancel if you move, but if you get the Silver Charge at level 5, you can move while channeling, enabling you to easier land the full damage.

Vilya has also been getting back into portrait duty. Here are some of the new remakes, featuring the rival Marino, bandit leader Vilya and her minion Teddy:

The Arena has felt a bit emtpy and dead for a while, so Fred have spiced things up with a live audience! The audience is a single 100×100 animated tile that can be looped seemlesly.

Click on the image to view an animated gif!

Besides animation work, Fred put in a Arcade Mode session on his livestream this Saturday. For anyone intrested in seeing one of the devs getting stomped by Arcade Mode, you can check out the VOD by clicking here!

This week we’re switching back from Arcade Mode again to work on skills!

Do you remember the snow summon called Frosty Friend, which Fred has worked on for some time? At last, the time has come for it to appear inside the game!

Click to view an animated gif!

This is a pretty early prototype, but the foundation works pretty well! As we mentioned a while back, this summon differs from the other two in that it’s a physical participant in the combat, and as such it can take damage as well as deal it. This also means that we must handle how the summon dies, and recovers HP. We’ll definitely have to test and iterate our way to the best solution, but we can share some of the ideas we’re going to try out first.

When the snow creature dies, it will get knocked out from the fight, lying dazed until its owner resurrects it. The resurrection mechanic works just like in multiplayer. That is, you’ll have to stand still beside your pet for four seconds to wake it up. Your pet will regain health automatically in time when it’s out of combat, and become fully healed when you zone. Unsummoning your pet will flag it as out of combat, but it will still take some time to recover health. A knocked out pet cannot be unsummoned.

Skills have been the name of the game in the animation department as well, wrapping up the last animations for the Frosty Friend amongst other things.

The multiplayer implementation of the Arcade Mode is almost complete, and we’ve had a long, sweaty testing session in the “office” today! We could’ve streamed it over at Fred’s Twitch channel, but we didn’t think of that until we were nearly finished. However, we’ll probably test it some more in the coming days and we’ll try to remember to stream it then so everyone can watch us fail miserably at our own game! :D

On the subject of streams, Fred has begun streaming on his previously mentioned channel again! Since he might be streaming pretty often, we won’t be posting the link on Facebook each time, so we recommend anyone interested in watching him do animation work to follow him on Twitch or us over on Twitter.

Anyway, back to Arcade Mode. As always, we’re making an effort to make multiplayer as interesting as the single playerexperience. The monster scaling carries over automatically from the Story Mode, but we’re also modifying encounters and room sizes to better accommodate the number of players in the game.

To avoid having players becoming more powerful as an effect of the increased enemy count, the drop rates are adjusted to make it comparable to how much money and loot a single player would’ve received. Speaking of loot, a huge difference in the Arcade Mode compared to the Story Mode is that clients receive their own loot, kind of like how it is in Diablo 3. This is to avoid having a single player accidentally (or intentionally) take all the good loot, and it also leads to a lot greater diversity in how players build!

The resurrection system is also altered, disabling in-combat resurrection completely. Instead, any players that die will automatically revive with 1 HP when a room is cleared! This might seem harsh, but since health is the most valuable resource in the Arcade Mode, having regular resurrection would be very powerful as it constitutes a form of healing.

To round things off, here’s an animation from an upcoming skill with the hugely creative work name “Berserker Mode“!

We hope you’ve all had a great Christmas as well as a good start to the new year! The three of us took some needed time off and spent some quality time with friends and family, absorbing energy to make this year as productive as we possibly can. Hopefully all the amazing support you’ve given us during last year will carry over to 2014!

Since we pretty much just landed from the holidays we don’t have much too show this week, but we’ve managed to scramble together something!

We’re doing our best to give each area in the Arcade Mode its own unique challenges, and the Flying Fortress is no different! These little trinkets will take the torch from thorns and beehives at making adventurers’ lives miserable.

The yellow crystal will continuously spawn new random enemies until it’s destroyed, while the red flying thingamajig is part of a bullet hell challenge (a recurring theme during the dungeon in Story Mode)!